


as within, so without

by AdhocPeacock



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Armaggedid actually happen, Aziraphale is still That Bitch in a cell, BAMF Aziraphale (Good Omens), Blood and Torture, Both boys lose their memories, Crowley is still eternally anxious, Fuck if that's gonna change anything though, Ineffable Idiots (Good Omens), M/M, Memory Loss, Protective Crowley (Good Omens), Romance, Strap in kids if I'm gonna be sad so are you, things get worse before they get better
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-26
Updated: 2019-11-26
Packaged: 2021-02-16 13:28:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21508693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdhocPeacock/pseuds/AdhocPeacock
Summary: The humidity of the room was beginning to fog Crowley’s sunglasses to the point of obscuring his vision. He reached up and pulled them off, folded them, and tucked them into the collar of his shirt. Showing off his eyes was uncomfortable for reasons he didn’t quite understand, but he wanted to see clearly. It was suddenly, imperatively important that he could.The angel's eyes flicked up as Crowley approached.Blue, he thought, blinking in the low light. For a long moment, that intense stare trapped his own as if he were the one in the cell.Hell wins the war to end all wars. Aziraphale and Crowley's memories are wiped. Then, Crowley is charged with the interrogation of a rather tetchy angel. AU in which there's an ark full of angst with a happy ending.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 53





	as within, so without

The demon wore sunglasses when he wandered up to earth, though black ash obscured any trace of sunlight. He ventured down a path, alone, and frowned at the burnt landscape surrounding him.

The world had ended with the boiling sizzle of sulfur and the blinding power of holy light. Bones stuck up from the festering pool that once was a pond in a grassy park. Black feathers littered the ground — there were fewer white feathers, but it was hard to tell which were black and which were white now. Ash fell from the sky slow as hesitant rain that didn’t want to fall. The sun couldn’t get through the clouds, and so the world was dark in a haze of red light filtering through dust and smoke and ash.

With Holy Water, demons were destroyed completely. Angels, in a similar way to demons, didn’t so much die as disintegrate into nothing when Hellfire latched onto their souls. There'd been weapons angels and demons had built to fight, forged for slow, agonizing pain before final destruction. Swords tipped in holy water were made with all the smiting abilities of an angel into a concentrated form — Hell took to the idea of bullets and flaming arrows. It was not death. Death implied an _after._ At least, when it came to earthly beings. No, what died were the humans. Their homes, the trees and animals. They would even blame themselves for it — though, it only took a few days to stop caring whose fault it was anyway.

Crowley stepped over a demon’s body, curled on its side. An angel’s limp form was splayed out beside the edge of the lake, stained white clothes flapping in the searing breeze.

It felt wrong; he felt alone. He didn’t know why. Something was off, a low bubbling panic in his lungs, but he didn’t know why. He couldn’t bring himself to pull the sunglasses from his face.

Crowley dropped onto a bench and pulled a cigarette from his pocket. With a thought, he lit it, breathing in the smoke. It tasted little different than the air. He wondered at the humans, near extinct now. He’d fallen for asking too many questions, for such a human thing as curiosity. At some point in those thousands of years, he wondered what apple he must have eaten to fall before Adam and Eve did to be able to tempt them. Original sin predated the humans, it seemed. Now, he thought, that term didn’t really matter when there was nowhere left to fall from.

He wondered, with his new freedom, why he came to the remnants of a battlefield.

He wondered why his hands were shaking.

He wondered how long he’d believed there were ever sides at all.

~

“Crowley.”

The demon turned, eyebrow raised. He’d only just returned from earth — disgusting place, if he ever saw one, made him feel rather sick to his stomach — and made a face at Beelzebub, who stood behind him with more flies and rotting flesh than the last time he saw zir, and also appeared more pleased than he’d ever seen. He supposed being pleased is the sort of thing demons feel when they destroy heaven.

“Uh, yeah?” Crowley asked.

“You’ll be in the boilerzzz for the foreseeable future. Some of those rowdy angelzzz are throwing holy light at the torture crew.”

“You know, stylish as they may be, my glasses aren’t impervious to that, right?”

Beelzelbub shrugged, but bothered to shoot Crowley a look. There was a high pitched buzzing noise, and the sound grew with the slow curl of Beelzelbub’s lips upward. “I think the placement izzzzz perfect for you.”

“Yeah, whatever,” he said, and started down the hall.

Angels were kept Below. This was under the basement, where there lived and worked the demons of the boiler rooms, filled to the brimstone with furnaces and “expansion projects,” which was a fancy name for digging out more cells to hold more prisoners. There was a shoddy elevator that went down to the sub-basement; it was a steel cage resembling an old mining lift that squealed as it opened. Crowley stepped inside, glancing distrustfully at the rusted chains meant to carry him down. He shut the cage doors manually, ignoring the rotting, file-toting demon quick-stepping down the hall towards the lift, and who flipped Crowley off for not opening it again to catch the ride.

He ignored the shrieks and pleas for God to save them from each floor he lowered past, noise fading and rising as the cage crawled past the open hallways. The dim, flickering lighting only got more flickery and yellowed at every level. After a long while, just long enough to believe one might be trapped on an elevator for eternity, it hit the ground with a clanging thunk.

Crowley pushed back the sliding door, kicking it when the metal caught on rusted wheels, and exited the lift. It was more dungeon-y cave down here than building. Water dripped from above, and low echoes from deep within the complex tunnel system turned voices distorted and classically demonic.

Crowley took a wrong turn and had to track back, glaring at the “Directory” sign as he passed, wherein there was nothing aside from a shitty letterboard with the message:

_**IF LOST KEEP MOVING  
MAYBE WE WON’T FIND YOU ******_ ********

They’d clearly lost some of the white letters to stick onto the board, some of them upside down or replaced with another (the number 3 replaced E, L used for T), and someone had added a little count of how many demons had been killed or lost or fired this month. That, or it was a nice ongoing game of Minesweeper.

When he figured out the correct direction, Crowley headed down the tunnel. Angels, though originally the same as demons, still couldn’t handle fire in any similar way. Heaven was cold, bare — this much Crowley knew from when he still called it his home, but more recently in the invasion to wildly set Hellfire to the head offices. It hadn’t been so cold after that.

“Yo,” Crowley said to the guard demon.

Guard Demon stared back with wide pupils and ashy hair that moved. It took Crowley a moment to realize that its hair was actually a mass of twitchy, crawling moths.

Crowley put a hand on his hip and waved it aside with the other. “On a schedule, move it or goose it, I don’t care.”

The demon shifted aside, muttering something under its breath, but that might have been the tapping sounds of wings fluttering in indignation. Crowley stepped through the open gate behind it, darting into what was finally a more open space. Rock turned to a dark, concrete grey, and the echoes became less distant and more noisy, but at least more than two demons could stand side by side.

Standing the middle of the room was Algea, the demon viscount of torture and interrogation: she was, in fact, very good at her job. She also kept getting passed up for a promotion, which did nothing for her mood, nor for the kept prisoners of war.

“Need some angel wrangling help?” Crowley asked.

She turned to him, full heel turn. Her hair was a messy bun, stray black hair wild and unkempt — but it was her eyes that unnerved most. They were black as an isolation room, and held the constant orange reflection of fire, as though she were always looking into the burning river Phlegethon below that powered the boiler rooms. Her skin was dark and tinged an indigo hue, reminiscent of a body floating in the depths of the open ocean.

“Do you know how many angels we have down here? We don’t have room for all of them.”

Crowley raised a brow. “How many prisoners did we take? Didn’t we just do a huge thing? Like, to kill them all?”

Algea scoffed, gesturing towards the halls of cells with a sneer. “I’m loathe to kill them outright if they’re not gonna be making any more of ‘em. Limited stock, shall we say?”

“Sure,” Crowley said. “I’m sure they’ve got some uses.”

“They do,” Algea answered, but didn’t explain further. “You’re going to be knocking the angels in the eastern quarter down a few pegs.”

He grimaced, but getting shoved a duty like that was to be expected. He’d been given a couple commendations for his deeds during the war — dispatching a couple angels single-handedly during Armageddon will do that for your image.

Algea looked down, squinting at a clipboard covered in scratch marks, and he wondered idly if fingernails could be used as writing utensils. He hadn’t seen her holding it before. It also didn’t look like any language he’d ever seen.

“Mm, yeah, torture isn’t really my, uh, aesthetic,” Crowley said, because stabbing an angel on the battlefield when said angel was also trying to kill you felt a world away from breaking the fingers of a begging prisoner.

Her black eyes snapped to him, embers alighting within them. He felt a chill run across his neck, like someone breathing on him from behind. He knew better than to look over his shoulder.

“Right,” said Crowley. He paused. “Which way is east?”

Algea pointed a bony, pale finger with untrimmed nails towards a darkened corridor. Crowley followed, went down the smaller, claustrophobic halls of the boiler rooms in the general vicinity of her pointing and deigned to make this as quick as humanly possible. Well. Demonly possible now, he supposed.

Random pipes emerged from the walls, some steaming, some hissing, others dripping. There was only so much room to navigate, and it seemed like the walls were growing smaller as he went. He nearly killed himself on a piece of scrap metal jutting out from the ceiling and decided that, yes, the roof was sloping down.

There was a light at the end of the tunnel — literally, here, except it wasn’t heaven on the other side.

Crowley met the gate with a long sigh.

_Why bother with opening and closing them if it's not gonna hold anyone back?_

He kicked it, the ear-splitting screech of the hinges protested with the threat of snapping off entirely. Beyond this, there were the boilers. The room was a different sort of uncomfortable from the tight, narrowing halls that lead into the open hall. Around the outskirts of the steaming metal colossus in the center of the room, there were the cells.

They were brick walled, musty and humid from superheated water vapor intensifying the air. Three on either side of the room. A couple cells contained bodies still clothed in muddied white, laying or sitting against the back walls farthest from the wrought iron bars. At least two angels seemed somewhat alert, and one more who he couldn’t have guessed whether they were alive or not. He didn’t look closer than that to see if they were all occupied.

The eastern wing held the most dangerous, powerful angels captured in the war. He couldn’t put that knowledge to the scene before him, with the bedraggled creatures in the cells.

Guard Demon Two stepped out from one of the connecting side halls, dark skinned and crawling with beetles across a face that seemed to be missing a few holes of flesh.

“Crawley,” he said.

Crowley thinned his lips. Did anyone know how to actually initiate conversation or should he just start demanding to see nametags too?

“Crowley now, thanks,” said Crowley, shifting his weight between his feet. This was great, really, a sort of demonic promotion. Torture and interrogation tactics, super fun, he was a demon, demons enjoyed this sort of thing. He glanced up, and an angel’s eyes met his from across the room. Crowley quickly averted his.

Guard Demon Two looked vaguely surprised, but didn’t question further. “Don’t get the memos down here. Sounds close to the same thing anyway.”

“Not really.” It slipped from his mouth before he could think about it, but he found he didn’t want to take it back either.

The guard blinked dubiously — or, he maybe not blink, exactly. Something hiding inside his eyes flapped its wings. “Right. So, we’re essentially splitting up the work in angels of higher choirs. They aren’t super motivated at the moment, but they can get worked up, and that’s when, uh,” he lowered his voice, as though the angels curled up in their cells might hear. “Well.”

“Yeah?” Crowley asked. “Love a good smiting, me.”

The guard shot him an unenthused look. “Not much of it, luckily. They’re pretty weak and all, getting weaker around a source of hellfire. Won’t kill you, probably. Just don’t get too close if you’re not ready to knock ‘em back down.”

“Noted.” He didn’t like to think about trying to deflect holy light, but he was admittedly better at ducking and dodging than most demons were. He had instincts, and a good assortment of skills that added up to _not dying._

“You’ve been assigned to the Principality. Nice,” Guard Demon Two said, humming his approval. He looked up, and Crowley noted with some odd detachment that his eyes were not eyes but hollows, tiny insects crawling inside the black space.

Crowley waited. The guard shrugged, gestured a shoulder towards a cell near the back. “Back there. You’ve got yourself a feisty one. More fun for you,” he said.

It took Crowley a split second too long to remember that he meant fun as an un-ironic sentiment. “M’kay,” was about all he could muster.

He looked towards the cell, and then back to the demon. “Er. What am I supposed to do?”

A dispassionate gaze was lowered in Crowley’s direction. Or, he thought it was dispassionate. Hard to tell with demons lacking distinctive facial features.

The demon frowned and Crowley regretted asking the question altogether.

“Weren’t you briefed?” the demon said.

“No,” Crowley said.

“Hm. Beelzelbub isn’t on top of it today,” said Guard Demon Two, and turned towards him, affording him with a bit more attention. “There’s a vault in heaven with some holy weapons. We want them, and the Guardian of the Eastern Gate is going to know how to get in.”

“You know he’s got that kind of information?”

“I know you’re gonna find out,” the demon said, too casual.

Crowley’s legs shifted into something more akin to jelly. “Oh. ‘Course.”

The other demon turned away, heading back through the halls.

And then Crowley was left alone. Steam hissed like a coiled snake backed into a corner. His legs carried him to the cell of their own volition; he most certainly didn’t tell them to move.

The humidity of the room was beginning to fog Crowley’s sunglasses to the point of obscuring his vision. He reached up and pulled them off, folded them, and tucked them into the collar of his shirt. Showing off his eyes was uncomfortable for reasons he didn’t quite understand, but he wanted to see clearly. It was suddenly, imperatively important that he could.

The angel inside flicked his eyes up as Crowley approached.

_Blue,_ he thought, blinking in the low light. For a long, tense moment, intense stare trapped his own as if he were the one in the cell.

The body sitting in the cell wore some approximation of a suit, torn and stained with blood, was pale. Too pale, he thought, because the heat in this place was enough to make the lungs work harder, meant to tire and grate upon holy visitors in its own sort of torture. It should have brought a flush to the angel’s cheeks, but he must have put up quite a fight before he was captured to result in that blood loss — Crowley’s gaze caught, lingering on the dark spots littered across his clothing. There it remained until the angel shifted uncomfortably under his scrutiny.

The angel frowned, gaze flittering around in uncertainty, like he was waiting for a fleet of torture-device wielding demons to appear behind Crowley. “I was expecting the actual torture bit.”

Crowley opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it, wordlessly gaped for a moment before he found his voice again. “What, you want to be tortured?”

“No,” said the angel, shrugging as he leaned back wearily against the brick wall. “I’d just like it over with.”

Crowley squinted at him, brows raised. “You just. Want me to get on with it,” he said.

“If you would.”

His eyes — _blue, blue_ — were defiant, bright. Crowley saw what the demon meant when he said this angel was feisty — just, not in the way Crowley was expecting. “Uh, yeah, I’ll get right on that.”

The angel nodded, took a deep breath, and waited.

Crowley stared, his body frozen in place.

The angel frowned, hesitant. “...there was torture to be involved in today’s session, wasn’t there?”

“Yes, I’m getting there,” Crowley snapped. He grit his teeth together, seething a hard breath through them. He didn’t have an issue cutting down angels on the battlefield, and he wasn’t a stranger to the look of pain in another being’s eyes as he did it. This should be simple. Piece of cake, easiest job he’d had in a long while.

Perfectly good, torturable angel, right there in the cell.

His stomach twisted hard, nearly enough to bowl him over.

Right. Easy enough, just kick the body a few times. It’s a meat sack, not even worth the consideration, a separate entity in the same way a bug isn’t the same as an elephant, and—

“Sometime this Armageddon?” the angel asked.

Crowley shot back lowly, “I don’t heed to angel commands.”

“You seem to not be heeding demon commands,” said the angel, brows raised.

Crowley frowned. “Are you _trying_ to be nicked off?”

The angel blinked, as though he only just came to the realization that perhaps he shouldn’t be antagonizing the demon who was supposed to rip the feathers from his wings. A fascinating set of expressions crossed over pale, nearly-but-not-quite plump cheeks, and swam through too deep eyes.

And from there the angel was silent, Crowley left to regather his thoughts into some pile that might have resembled a brain. Maybe. Halfway there into something more of a consistency to tapioca pudding.

The angel opened his mouth to speak, but seemed to decide against it, because his eyes lowered, lips closing again.

Crowley frowned, the twist of something painful in his stomach again. He couldn’t manage to look at the holy thing sitting there without it happening. He had the most intense, inexplicable urge to swing open the cell door and answer an urge to run, flee, escape, angel in tow. Crowley swallowed. Indigestion, that was it.

Closing in on the burning metal bars, Crowley leaned a hip against them, arms crossed. He lowered his voice, despite how loud the machinery was behind him. “Look. I’m all for this torture thing and all, but I’ve got better things to be doing with my time, so I’ll make this a quick session. I’m a very busy demon.”

The angel’s eyes flicked between Crowley’s startling yellow ones, as though trying to piece him out. Crowley decided he was mildly uncomfortable with this, like he was the one facing judgement. Except, angels didn’t really do that sort of thing anymore.

It was a little bit too long into the awkward silence before Crowley realized that he was the one supposed to make the next move.

Torture, right.

For a split second, he considered turning around and walking straight back to Beelzelbub and demanding what the hell this was supposed to be. This wasn’t _normal,_ most certainly not the sort of job for demons without certified degrees in maiming and dismemberment.

Crowley looked blankly at weapons hung on the outside of the wall. Condensed water dripped from the cruel, sharp metal of the diabolical instruments in the same way as blood. Slowly, he reached forward, grabbing something — a sickle, he realized in a daze — and stiff, mechanical legs brought him to the cell door. The key to open it was heavier than it should have been.

He opened the cell door with the screaming creak of hinges, the sound of it ratcheting back and forth inside the hollow of his chest.

The angel watched him, steeled and ready.

Crowley was struck again, lungs stuttering. _His eyes._

Crowley thought of the sea. They were tired and wary, old but not broken, not yet. They were deep, bottomless, and Crowley was afraid of what he might find in the depths. That there was something to find. There was a sudden, slicing knowledge that cracked against the inside of Crowley’s chest like the tide: he could break those eyes, split the ocean of their blueness like the Red Sea, taint the water with the same color.

That gaze was firm, unbroken, but possessed not even a shred of hope within them. Not for now, not for the future. The angel had already accepted his fate.

And then he closed his searing blue eyes, waiting, expectant. Crowley gripped the blade with enough force to turn his knuckles white. Easy job, the sort of thing any demon worth their salt would delight in. A couple slashes along his back, enough to maim, not enough to kill. Crowley could drag out the pain as long as he wanted.

Crowley stared too long at that face.

_Angelic,_ he thought, but he didn’t think he understood the meaning of the word, like there was a coded definition he was missing. He spent a moment too long studying that expression, those curved lips thinned and resigned, long eyelashes, the white, tousled hair.

His brain went fuzzy, like feedback in a crackle of static electricity. Something twisted so violent and painful inside of him that he stepped back, heart thudding, lungs seizing.

He couldn’t do it.

“I—“ Crowley started. The angel cracked his eyelids open and frowned, confused. Bright blue, clear eyes looked at him, and he could imagine them as concerned. They neared too close to it now, cautious but verging upon the sentiment. Crowley had the most inexplicable, desperate urge to cry.

An awkward moment passed where they stared blankly at one another.

“...are you alright?” asked the angel, who looked somewhat baffled that he was inquiring after the demon’s well-being whilst residing in a torture chamber.

Crowley swallowed. There was nothing lower than this, nothing lower than the furnaces of hell itself except the damned rivers from where hell drew its demonic power — he still strongly desired the ground to open and take him under. Drowning would be ideal.

How dare this angel pretend to pity him? Or worse, mean it?

How dare it ask if he was _alright?_

Curling his lips into a sneer, he growled at the disgusting, vile holy creature. _“Fuck. You.”_

Crowley whirled on his feet and stormed from the cell, slamming the barred door behind him. He threw the sickle somewhere near the hanging weaponry. It cracked into the wall with a metallic clatter, but not before he heard a very pointed mutter of, “same goes to you, I suppose.”

Crowley the boiler room, ignoring Algea’s unreadable stare as he entered the main hall.

“I’ll be back,” Crowley hissed, daring her to make comment as he passed. She didn’t. The elevator ride up was far longer on the way up than the way down.

Thankfully, sobriety was not considered heavenly behavior.

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the end times, my friends. This fic is also half of a larger, collaborative concept of alternate endings — if you'd like to read the wonderful, beautifully written fic in which Heaven wins Armageddon by Lightningpelt, hop on over here: [as above, so below](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21565996/chapters/51415201)
> 
> Thank you for reading!


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